Before anyone ever saw him, he already had a plan.
A plan to erase everything.
He stood alone in the ruins of an abandoned city, the air heavy with the scent of rust and ash. The once-proud skyscrapers were nothing but shattered teeth gnawing at the sky, their glass eyes blind, their metal bones broken. A stray breeze pushed dust across cracked streets, whispering through rusted cars like ghosts mourning their own absence.
To him, this silence was beautiful. But not enough.
The man was tall, his hair black as midnight, his eyes pale gray, almost lifeless. In his hand rested a scythe—its long, curved blade faintly glowing, shifting between white and black, light and shadow, as though caught in a constant argument between existence and nothingness.
They called him "The Keeper of Graves."
Not because he buried the dead. But because he decided who stayed dead… and who didn't.
With a thought, he could drain the vitality from an army and leave them as dry husks on the ground. With a gesture, he could return the long-decayed to mockeries of life, their broken bodies obeying him without question. Life and Death weren't absolutes to him. They were clay in his hands, threads he could weave or cut whenever he pleased.
And what did he want?
Not power. Not conquest. Not wealth.
He wanted silence.
The eternal stillness that comes when no heart beats, no soul stirs, no breath whispers through the air. A silence so complete, it would stretch across the planet and beyond, devouring even the echo of memory.
"The balance is broken," he muttered, his voice hollow, echoing off the dead walls of the city. "Life overruns death. Death is mocked by rebirth. Souls return when they should not. This world refuses to rest."
He tilted his head back, staring at the warped shimmer in the sky—the faint scar of the last space-time quake. It pulsed faintly, like a wound refusing to close.
A thin smile touched his lips.
"Good. The world is already cracking. The barrier weakens. Soon, I won't even have to try."
His plan was simple. First, destabilize the Dimensional Barrier—those unseen walls that shielded the planet from the crushing weight of the seventeen-dimensional continuum. Each quake brought the barrier closer to collapse. When it finally shattered, the friction of space and time would tear into the world, consuming everything in its path.
But that wasn't enough.
If left alone, the collapse might leave fragments—souls wandering, clinging, reincarnating into some other layer of reality. He would not allow that. With his authority over Life and Death, he would ensure there was no rebirth. No afterlife. No cycle.
When the Dimensional Barrier fell, he would snuff out every spark. Permanently.
"Only then," he whispered, his hand running gently along the edge of his scythe, "will this world finally know peace. A peace of perfect silence."
He stepped forward, boots crunching against broken stone, and began walking. His pace was calm, unhurried, like a man with all the time in the world. He wasn't hunting anyone. He wasn't seeking challengers. His path simply cut through the flow of the world, and anyone standing in it would be erased.
Fate—or perhaps the cracks in fate—would decide whom he met.
And somewhere not far away, two storms were brewing: one named Hikaru Amamiya, who broke the laws themselves, and one named Ren Kurokawa, who devoured power like flame devoured air.
The Keeper of Graves didn't know their names. They didn't know his.
But soon, their paths would collide.
Like two destinies grinding together until sparks flew.
Like the world itself holding its breath before the storm.